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LXer Weekly Roundup for 08-Aug-2010

A roundup of the big stories hitting our newswire from the previous week.

Negroponte offers OLPC technology for $35 tablet: One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned US$35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology.

The Jargon of Freedom: 60 Words and Phrases with Context: What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.

Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux: As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

Android Deployments up 868%: Worldwide smartphone analysts Canalys announced that Android deployments had increased by 886 percent in Q2 2010 compared to Q2 2009. The report also showed that Nokia remained at the top of the OEM heap, selling 24 million smartphones in Q1 2010 alone.

Sun takeover latest - Oracle still painfully silent…: In the months since it completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has remained painfully silent over its plans for much of Sun’s treasure trove of open source assets. In the meantime, there are an increasing number of companies stepping up to shepherd Oracle’s lost sheep…

bash one-liner, Get GPS location and street Address: Combine the power of Google location services with the power of nix shell tools, and you are able to answer the age old question of "Where am I?" right from the comfort of your bash shell! This short article shows you a bash onliner that connects to Google and gets what Google thinks is your GPS location and street address. Quoting the author "If the returned information is wrong, or some kind of "unknown" .. Consider yourself lucky, very lucky! That means Google does not (yet?) know where your wifi AP is. For the rest of us .. tin-foil all the way"

Ubuntu 10.10's New File System: btrfs, A Closer Look: Between ext3, ext4, reiserfs and others, Ubuntu has no shortage of file systems to choose from when installing a new system. And those options are set to become yet more numerous in Ubuntu 10.10, which will introduce support for btrfs. Wondering what this new file system is all about and why it might matter to you?

BCS Linux-baiting sparks flame war: An article on open source security has sparked off a furious backlash in the normally polite and businesslike world of a British Computer Society journal. Commentards have reacted furiously to a piece by Steve Smith, managing director of IT security consultancy Pentura, in the July Edition of ITNow. A lengthy first response by Luke Leighton takes the article apart paragraph by paragraph and contains a dozen expunged swearwords. The opening line of the 4,000 word rebuttal, for example, reads "the BCS is supposed to be a reputable organisation, yet this article - every paragraph - is complete [DELETED]."

Debian Developer Conference under way in New York City: The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which underlies Linux distros including Ubuntu, Xandros, and Chrome OS.

Not Having Linux Skills is IT Malpractice: Some things seem so obvious I feel silly even saying them. And this is one of them: any IT staffer who only knows one operating system is not worth hiring. We see the silly Microsoft vs. Linux vs. Apple stories every day, with Ten Reasons Why This One is Better, and 7 Reasons Why That One Sucks, and Five Ways to Make Headlines With Lists. The ones that crack me up are the "10 Scary Hurdles to Migrating to Linux." Ever notice how every single time they mention "You'll need Linux skills!" Oh dear, no! Linux skills? Well there's a dealbreaker! Because it is completely unreasonable to expect your current batch of delicate Windows admins to have any Linux skills. Sigh.

11 free open-source apps your small business can use now: Despite the wealth of free applications out there, many small business owners continue to spend an inordinate amount of their all-too-scarce resources on software. Microsoft Office 2010? That'll be $499.99 -- or $279.99 if you can do without the Professional version. QuickBooks 2010? $159.95 or more. Adobe PhotoShop CS5? A whopping $699. The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need, and most of them are excellent. Whether or not you've already made the switch to Linux -- there are, after all, myriad security and other reasons for doing so -- these free apps can be just what any small business needs to succeed.

Digg, dug, buried: Linux: A liberal blogger has uncovered that a "group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com has just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, up-vote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives." The blogger, Ole Ole Olson, infiltrated a group that called itself Digg Patriots. His proof is quite damning.